In 1954 I left my native Buenos Aires for Mexico City. I was 12 years old. In Buenos Aires I never heard any tango as my mother opted for the classical radio stations that played the kind of music that I identified as “música del Teatro Colón.”

It was only when I returned to Buenos Aires in 1965 to do my military service in the Argentine Navy (ARA – Armada República Argentina) that I was first exposed to tango.

It was not the conventional tango. I purchased two records called Tango contemporáneo - Astor Piazzolla y su nuevo octeto (1963) and Concierto en el Philharmonic Hall de New York (1965). I was particularly attracted to Piazzolla’s dissonance because by then I had been a fan of the music of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

Piazzolla y su nuevo octeto (1963)

I remember getting into a heated argument with my first cousin Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena who said that this “Nuevo tango” could not be tango as it could not be danced to. Many years later in the late 90s I learned to dance the tango in Vancouver and I had no problem with Piazzolla.

But as I wrote here, it was in a live Piazzolla concert that I fell in love with a beautiful woman called Susy.

I am planning on driving in late March to New Dublin, Ontario where my Rosemary was raised. I have a portable CD player that I can plug into my car and I have at least 50 hours of Piazzolla music which I will listen to on my way.

I was in Buenos Aires from December 20 until the 30^th. I wanted to escape the gloom of a Christmas without Rosemary. But it was to no avail as I found that staying in our former Hotel Claridge her ghost was everywhere.

My family and my friends who work at the Claridge all told me that as soon as I was back in Vancouver I would miss Buenos Aires.

They were right.

I must amend that, in writing here, that what I miss is an Argentine/Buenos Aires identity that is in me that compiles all my experiences of having been in that city and having met Julio Cortázar, run into Jorge Luís Borges (without knowing who he was) several times in the mid-60s at the Pigmalion Bookstore, embraced Doctor Arturo Illía (the man I had helped depose on 28 June 1966) in 1972 in Mexico City and then the three times I went to the city with my Rosemary. Rosemary somehow became part of that fabric of identity that is my Argentine self.

There is a word in Spanish, particularly used by porteños - arraigado. It is about being attached to something or a place, much in the same way as a band aid. It is then painful to remove it. This feeling about being part of Buenos Aires is that.

Today I listened to an Astor Piazzolla DVD. I found myself crying loudly with little control. Carlos Gardel or Julio Sosa leave me cold (well, a bit warm) but Piazzolla is in my heart.

There is something about his music that defines “costumbrismo”which is a literary term used in Spanish for literature (and music, too?) that is only of one city. Jorge Luís Borges wrote stories where he defined accurately corners in his Buenos Aires.

Piazzolla, just a few notes of anything he has written, brings in me showers of Buenos Aires memories, of my past, of my recent past and of last week.

I believe that only an Argentine native of Buenos Aires, “a porteño” can feel this.

I cried because I knew that I was listening to Piazzolla and knowing there is nobody I can share him with. I would add that his music is not a happy music. Somehow I now identify Piazzolla’s music with my grief for my loss of Rosemary and in his music I can see in my mind her face.

Can it be possible that my Canadian Rosemary had in her a costumbrismo for my city – Buenos Aires?

Today is New Year’s Eve and melancholy is setting in spite of the warm company of Niño and Niña. On my way home from the YVR airport, back from Buenos Aires, I told my driver to pass by the West Boulevard Feline Hilton.

The trip to Argentina was not what I thought it would be. I would sit in Hotel Claridge lobby wingchair in wait of Rosemary who was to come down from our room in the elevator (or so it seemed).

It was in Mexico many years ago that Rosemary and I adopted the Spanish custom of eating 12 grapes each before midnight. I went around the corner and bought the grapes. Tonight I will eat 24.

At the Ateneo bookstore, around the corner from my hotel, I found this lovely book of love poems by a passionate Argentine poet (a feminist to boot) Alfonsina Storni who is virtually unknown outside her country (although she was born in Switzerland).  I have other books of hers but this one is special. I had a moment of strange awareness two days ago as I was reading it in that Claridge Hotel wingchair.

Links to more of my Alfonsina Storni blogs

I have come to realize that somehow my future is behind me and my past is in front of me. I look into that past as if it is now and I see that first image of Rosemary sometime at the end of 1967. In my mind and out loud I call out here name and think of her as the young 23-year-old I met when I was just 25.It is as if I am about to have my first date with her.

There was one poem, whose title and last sentence hit me like a blow.

Tú, que nunca serás…

Tu, que nunca serás del todo mío.

You, who will never be…

You, who will never be all mine.

I seems I am falling in love with a girl I just met all over again.

Niño & Niña January 6 2022

Of late since I have returned from Buenos Aires I have been hit with a fit of depression which is all about isolation during dark, cold, rainy and snowy days. It has not helped that since I went swimming with my A5 Galaxy phone in the Claridge Hotel I have been without the ability to look up words I read in my books or the NY Times with Google. Perhaps I might have my phone back and repaired next week.

Meanwhile I find that my Niño and Niña keep me company all day. I am not sure I agree with the Argentine pope that cats and dogs go to heaven. I do not believe I will go there or the place below. I opt for my personal reality of oblivion.

Perhaps Bergoglio and I share the idea of the humanity of cats. Are they persons? Are they aware that they exist? Most of all I see them as living memories as they were both loved by my Rosemary.

Cats and the meaning of death  

Turning into a cat 

Geranium 'Rozanne'& Feline Philosophy 

 An ode to a cat - Pablo Neruda 

A un gato - Jorge Luís Borges

To a cat - Jorge Luís Borges 

It is comforting how they lie between my legs and on my chest when they can. As soon as I turn off the light at night they get very close. I can feel their body heat from below my sheets. While they are certainly not the heat of a human body and of my Rosemary there is something not palpable but that I feel that there is more to a cat than meets the eye.

I became very upset a few days ago when the very Roman Catholic son Jorge of my Argentine nephew Georgito reprimanded me for telling his five daughters that I was considering becoming a trans woman so I could be an authentic cat lady. He did not see the joke. I believe that anybody with a deep religious faith that does not include a sense of humour has to be fanatical.

Plata

I decided to Google (with this computer as I have no phone) if Christ ever laughed or smiled. If he did, there is no record in any of the gospels. But I am sure that he must have at some point.

Rosemary & Niña 5 December 2020 ( 4 days before Rosemary died)

 

Florence 2019

Rebecca at the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden

Our cat Gaticuchi

 

Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico 1962

My photographic life in 1962 in Mexico was simple. All I had to do was to pick up my Pentacon-F, load it with Kodak Tri-X and go out into the street to take whatever caught my eye. Sometimes with my friend Robert Hijar we would go on trips to Guanajuato, Mexico where I shot the pictures you see here.

I had no idea then that someday I would become a photographer in a place I had no idea existed then, Vancouver.

It was perhaps in these street photographs that I began to learn composition.

I look at these now and I feel like more than 64 years have gone by. Was it almost a lifetime? I had yet to meet Rosemary or do my military service in Buenos Aires. I was barely a young man as I was 20.

Looking at these photographs I can smell that fine scent that is dry dirt under a hot sun.

In the years that I have returned to Guanajuato (at least 8 times and once with not  only Rosemary but with our granddaughter Rebecca) I have passed by this city well and wondered what might have happened to that young girl. Her photograph plays a trick on her true size. She was tiny. And yet she almost looks like the grown woman she would one day be.

 

Buenos Aires - 1965

From this side of this 21st century I would like to tell you something about the sailor seen here. He is Argentine, and, because he was born according to his birth certificate on April 18, 1943 (and not his real Sanatorio Anchorena birth on 31 August, 1942) he did his two year military service in the Argentine Navy as Clase 1943 and is 22 years old here. Because Jorge Alejandro Waterhouse-Hayward is wearing navy blues, this photograph must have been taken during an August Buenos Aires winter. His hair seems a tad too long, so soon after this photograph, Cabo Moraña, Infantería de Marina ARA would have sent the conscript for a haircut.

The photograph was perhaps taken by one of Jorge Alejandro’s navy buddies with a Pentacon-F with a 50mm Tessar lens. There is no explanation for the apparent failure of the usually accurate focal plane shutter.